pungoose

ha!

Thu, 28 May 2009 21:15:22 GMT

... and wound up in The Worst French Restaurant In Soho for dinner (it had a pianist who knew the first three bars of at least two songs, the ugliest paintings you've ever seen on the wall, and a waitress who spoke no known language. The food took over two hours to come, and was neither what we had ordered, nor warm, nor edible).

(from an afterword written by Neil Gaiman).

OH! MY! GOD!

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:41:50 GMT

A DUCK! IN THE OFFICE!

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:30:33 GMT

The small bird emerged from the water.

It looked dreadful.

It was covered in mud and green weed.

"Aaah! What sort of Black Swan are you?"

"I'm not a Black Swan at all, you stupid man!"

"What are you if you're not a swan? You certainly look like ..."
"I certainly don't feel like a swan!"

(with apologies to Mr Scruff)

Nicholas Naseem Taleb says: "The Black Swan is about these unexpected events that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything. Before they happen we consider them close to impossible; Outside the arts, my favorite one is the emergence of the computer and the internet..."

The internet? Over what timescale? Computing history began terribly slowly (Babbage, Lovelace), through the analogue computers & calculating & codebreaking machines of the Second World War. The internet, as experienced by the layman today, does, indeed, seem miraculous, but people keep finding oddities prefiguring it, including Vannevar Bush's Memex, and several early 1990s short films, documentaries, and sales pitches, including Hyperland and Starfire.

Oh, and it gets better. Here's Arthur C. Clarke, in The Fountains of Paradise, writing in 1979:
... Morgan was left face to face with the accumulated art and knowledge of all mankind.

In his student days, he had won several retrieval championships, racing against the clock while digging out obscure items of information on lists prepared by ingeniously sadistic judges. ("What was the rainfall in the capital of the world's smallest national state on the day when the second largest number of home runs was scored in college basketball?" was one that he recalled with particular affection). His skill had improved with years... The display came up in thirty seconds, in far more detail than he really needed.

But, then, tFoP is set somewhere in the 22nd century, and Clarke has been known to write things like "We really must find something better than the internal combustion engine", in the late 1960s, I think. Still waiting for that one, and no, nuclear powered cars don't count. (Or flying cars. Especially flying nuclear powered cars, eesh... though, if memory serves, Clarke never learned to drive, regarding a means of transport that prevented the traveller from reading as a stupid idea).

I think Taleb refers, somewhere, to grey swans (which are somewhat unpredictable).

I want to call technological developments which are, in principle, foreseeable, but which lurk in the background for ages before springing forth, as greylag geese. They're grey, because they hide; lag, because of the unpredictable delay, and geese, because they're not really as exotic or surprising as swans.

However, when they've been talked about for 30-40 years, it is moderately startling when a huge flock of them suddenly appear, honking loudly, and towing a stock market bubble behind them. (That, there, is the late 1990s).

Also, Anser answer are rather charming, and deserve to have something named after them, I feel.

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:44:31 GMT

Naming your cows is beneficial. The study says nothing about the benefits of naming geese, however.

Retailing: You're doing it wrong

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:28:47 GMT

So, I want to buy this book, right? First call is amazon - maybe they can get it to me early next week. Some sort of expedited shipping option (not really that sort of shipping; no, not this sort, either) option. "That'll cost a tenner", say amazon, though possibly because there were other things in the basket, "but would you like a one month subscription to some sort of free rapid shipping thing?" "Fleeb", I think, indecisively, at which point I realise I could go to a real bookshop.

Ah, but maybe I could reserve online, because I know the book I'm after, and who knows if they'll have it or not? (I've heard that they keep smaller stocks now, because of internet shopping).

First stop: Foyles. Erkgh, their website really could use some work. Waterstones's is much slicker, but both of them take the same attitude, which appears to be, no! You cannot pay us money! We are going to make this difficult! We are going to make you sign up, give a password, give postal addresses, even though you're not about to get anything posted to you! We want to be amazon! And, a credit card transaction? Do they want to encourage me to buy nothing else in the shop by having made certain I'd paid already? Boggle.

Waterstones's looks slicker, but doesn't look like they particularly streamline the reserve-and-collect-in-person process either. As I recall, argos do, but they're a special case because they already have an unorthodox no-showroom shop design, and anyway, they don't sell books.

Sun, 04 May 2008 12:35:30 GMT

Vaguely considering setting up a blog for sensible, more on-the-record comment. Unsurprisingly, this blog tends to end up full of silly things like wordplay and waterbirds.

Sat, 03 May 2008 08:38:44 GMT

Boris the ~~spider~~ London Mayor.

And victory speeches in surprisingly good grace.

I await the promised New Routemasters curiously.

I'm sorry, I haven't a Humph

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:53:30 GMT

Took me until now to realise.

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:48:43 GMT

squeeee!!!!

Edit for unconfusion: Aza Raskin talks about Enso, his launcher software for getting computers to do what you want easily and more quickly. The squeenshot above is that software running on a mac; the existing version only runs under Windows.

Of course, wanting computers to do what you want easily, without lots of "Are you sure? (Yes)" is presumably a stupid mac thing. :P

(Does this count as an adult concept? I think it probably doesn't).

Why/How Jeanette Winterson drives me up the wall

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 09:38:04 GMT

(or, "Geese are not the only Waterbirds")

JW was interviewed in today's New Scientist, and said (italics are her, normal text is me)

I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Grace or Margaret Atwood, are great...

That is, frankly, a bit rich coming from someone who has just written a book called The Stone Gods, about, er, leaving Earth and settling a new planet, and who is writing a book called Robot Love, featuring a robot. Admittedly, for all I know, JW gave a lengthy and personal description of how genre sci-fi is intolerable after she had a dreadfully embarrassing teenage crush on a Betazoid... but the NS editor went "sod it" and removed the explanation.

Anyway...

When Stephen Hawking bangs on about how the future of mankind is in space, it makes me really depressed. It's a boy's fantasy, like not tidying your bedroom because your mother will do it - trash the place, then leave it. I wanted to challenge the idea that we can simply leave. Even if we could leave, not many of us would be allowed to go. It would be terrible.

Congratulations! You've just found the plot for The Songs of Distant Earth, which you probably never read, because it's science fiction. Anyway, that was a tiny-minded homespun gendered analogy. Here's more:

But there is a sense in which boys get mesmerised with the potential of invention in a mad, Dr Frankenstein way... Women are realistic probably because right across the world they're still the ones who tend the children, or look after the land. It's not wonder that we call the planet "she". It is home: men are always trying to escape from home, but we, women, are "home".

Sheesh. If I tried saying things like that amongst feminists, I'd be swiftly bashed over the head, stuffed with sage and onion, and roast before you could say "Honk". Look, you couldn't be any more sweeping if you were pushing an extremely large broom.

It gets stranger:

I tent to put my faith in the power of thought because I think people need to change from the inside out, not the outside in ...

*sings* I see a little silhoutetto of a false dichotomy

- that never works.

Never? Rarely? Sometimes? Never on a Thursday? I can has citation or argument with sweeping statement pls.

We've got into a "science can fix it" mentality... No matter how much we pollute the planet, science will clean it up, if we run out of oil it doesn't matter because the boffins will think of some other way.

Granted, there are those who argue that, and there have been for ages. Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes.

But I really think that school of thought has declined markedly since (say) the 1970s. Certainly there's currently a chorus of "reduce carbon emissions, switch shit off". I don't hear very many people saying "Noo, there's no problem, science will fix it!". There are certainly some saying "Climate change? Pah! s'all made up" -- including my very own Old Grandmother Goose -- but, hey, let's keep with the stereotypes here, females make homes and crochet cushions, males break stuff. Right? Right. (It's just proper gander).

It's always pushing the responsibility... onto "other" people... giving them enormous power and, at the same time, suggesting that there really aren't any problems.

It's this "delegation" thing. Y'know, we do things to help others? The monkey represents sharing. It doesn't mean the problem "just vanishes". (Then there's the assumption that "science" is done by boffins, who are, naturally, someone else).

~~It's the George W. Bush school of thought, which cannot be right.~~

Sod it. Gave up arguing, and used a typographical solution instead.

... the speed of love, which proves to be the one thing faster than light

Um. Squick.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more science fiction written as well as Winterson writes, and I'm more than happy to see sciencefictional themes hopping into mainstream literature and discussion, but too much of this feels like it spins down an entropic funnel, lined with Teflon, greased with non-sequiturs and sweeping, dubious assertions, and everything ends up being about love, domesticity, and untidy bedrooms. You can probably do that to a whole library, but if you're going to smash knowledge to pieces and pour it into a very small heap, a compression algorithm would be less destructive, and a big fire would be funner. With marshmallows. Yum.

WILL SELF says Harry potter books are

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:27:47 GMT

badly written!

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:16:22 GMT

Analogy of the day:

"It's like trying to herd snails safely away from a forest fire"

Odd Apple Software Update bug

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 23:07:05 GMT

I thought I'd put this here, because I earlier googled & drew a blank.

Well now, I was trying to run Software Update (on OSX 10.4.9), and it was telling me it wouldn't work because I wasn't connected to the Internet. Well, that was rubbish, and it did it for about a week, so clearly the internet was fine, and so were Apple's servers... So I had a look in the logs (console.log), and found

2007-06-08 00:15:47.883 System Preferences[21676] loader:didFailWithError:NSError "XML parser error:
	Encountered unexpected EOF
Old-style plist parser error:
	Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex
" Domain=SUCatalogLoader Code=0 UserInfo={
    NSLocalizedDescription = "
    NSURL = http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog; 
}

Cue a great deal of mucking about, including trying to search the entire system for knackered plists, and ktracing the command line softwareupdate.

There appears to have been some corrupt data in /Users/[my username]/Library/Caches/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate. Clearing that removed the problem.

Collaborations

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:55:12 GMT

Joels Veitch and Spolsky should collaborate. This would yield strange and mildly disturbing animations and songs about the merits of source control, daily builds, and a quiet working environment.

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:21:49 GMT

SWAN!!!

Threeplay from Sky, or, "holy f**k, it's 2007"

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 08:35:50 GMT

Profuse & humble apologies to Don McLean.

Note to the Judge: If you sentence me for crimes against music, please exile me to Siberia. Ta.

Warning: contains anachronisms, nostalgia, and dubious rhyme & meter.

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that internet used to make me smile.
And I knew if I could start ed
The world might notice what I said
And, maybe, I’d be happy for a while.

But the Long September made me shiver
With every spam and phish delivered.
Bad news in the inbox;
I couldn’t start one more SOCKS...

I can’t remember if I knew
When I read about Wired's "Long Boom"
But something touched me deep inside
The day the Mosaic died.

So...

(Chorus)
Buy, buy, a threeplay package from Sky,
IE7 said "ActiveX", but it wouldn't say why.
And the comp. sci. undergrads all get exceptions with try(),
singin', "a stack trace, and my program has died"
"A stack trace, and my program has died!"

Did you read the RFCs,
And do you have faith in the W3C,
if the standards say you SHOULD?
Did you believe in Xanadu,
or did you just say "Theodor ... Holm Who?"
and can you tell me why my connection's ... real slow?

(More may follow)

Christmas is coming

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:33:12 GMT

and I am getting fat.

"steady-state economy"

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 11:55:21 GMT

I am deeply alarmed by green campaigners' tendency to lurch from seemingly making sense to talking (what seems to me to be) absolute drivel. Example:

In New Scientist (25th November '06), Thomas Homer-Dixon is interviewed, and says:

it's increasingly clear that [an endlessly growing economy] is incompatible with the long-term viability of Earth's environment. We need to know what a "steady state" economy - one with a roughly constant output of goods and services - might look like.

You can imagine economic output, and how it's produced, staying at the current level, instead of growing. This would make lots of people poorer, but it wouldn't reduce CO2 emissions, protect fisheries, or anything else.

Conversely, you may be able to imagine a massive shift towards more sustainable means of production (the usual suspects: integrated pest control, renewable energy, emissions trading schemes, polluter-pays, recycling...) which would reduce ecological footprint without a massive (?) cost in foregone GDP.

steadystate.org claim this:

In a steady state economy, society focuses on goals more noble than economic growth.

... like, preventing economic growth? Is that a worthwhile goal?

(That's not to say that growth in GDP is necessarily the best thing for human welfare... there's a lot which GDP doesn't count. But it's far easier to campaign for that sort of thing when you haven't set yourself up on a soapbox fetishising constant GDP, rather than increasing GDP).

My current opinion: Trying to reduce ecological footprint by flattening GDP is akin to trying to reduce the spread of HIV by reducing the number of orgasms experienced.

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 20:41:40 GMT

I was bored with the Internet, so travelled around a bit. I didn't try and actually walk around the world, or even very far. Anyway, I'm back, and London seems very big and busy.

heatwaves and lidos...

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:09:48 GMT

back to Richmond after work on Wednesday. Oops! It swiftly becomes apparent that most of West London is there too. Can't blame them, but the whole place is full to bursting, barely enough lockers. The indoor pool was relatively quiet, but the outdoor one was packed, and the water cloudy. And with the deepest third roped off, and a fat red hose running from the fire hydrant pouring water into the roped-off deep end of the pool. And the outdoor (cold) showers just dribbled, presumably because of the water being put into the pool from the mains...

For actual swimming, forget it. For sunbathing, or lying around in the shade, with periodic dips to cool off, that'll work. Toy briefly with concept of moving to the coast, but rule it out for the moment on grounds of commute time & cost...

I am a cynic

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:31:33 GMT

You Are 72% Cynical

You're a full blown cynic... and probably even skeptical of these results.
You have your optimistic moments, but most likely you keep them to yourself.

How Cynical Are You?

My God!

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 07:58:08 GMT

According to this blog,

Rather than try to predict the future, [Bill] Gates created a population of competing Business Plans within Microsoft that mirrored the evolutionary competition going on outside in the marketplace. Microsoft thus was able to evolve its way into the future. Eventually, each of the other initiatives was killed off or scaled down, and Windows was amplified to become the focus of the company’s operating-system efforts.

That's a little too ironic.

Unwanted guests

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 01:08:43 GMT

So. There it is, about one in the morning, and I'm thinking "what is going on the car park?". Lights keep shining in the window & lighting everything up, as if someone's turning their car round in circles like a cat that hasn't quite decided whether to settle down.

At which point, a torch is pointed through my open window. I jump up, having had the sense of mind to grab a pillow to preserve my modesty, and find that the police are shining a torch through my window. Apparently, I'm not advised to have a window open on the ground floor. This is to my bedroom, effectively (this is a studio flat), because "if he'd have been a burglar he'd have jumped right in". Well, yes, except unless he'd been a contortionist he'd have had to push the window open, which would probably have woken me, and leaping into people's bedrooms to nick stuff is Russian Roulette, frankly. Much easier to, well, break in during the day, when most people are at work, or to rob people when you can see who they are, or all manner of other things. In fact, the Met Police themselves seem to stress making it look like you're in. Well I AM in. I'd be mad to leave my window wide open and unattended, therefore, I am either mad, or in. Several other flats' ground floor windows appear sealed. I looked. THEY are probably out, indeed.

Besides which, it's over twenty seven fucking degrees in here, and I want air. Despite which I'm now adequately freaked to have re-engaged a window lock & closed the window down to a crack at the bottom and a crack at the top, though mostly I'm freaked by basic adrenaline, rather than the genuine, rational fear of nocturnal cat burglars. (I was, in fact, woken by a cat arriving through the window the other night, but cats are welcome visitors, even if they sod off without a single mew).

Leaving the tube station, there were a bunch of warning signs: "thieves operate outside this station!". Perhaps they do; outside the station is a whole world, but, frankly, this is an exceedingly quiet, and rather expensive, corner of London. The trees are green, the pigeons coo softly, the cats have little bells and bask in the sun. I am not stupid enough to think there's no crime here, and I will have a word with my neighbours when they're next awake, and see if they think I'm being absurdly reckless.

domestic fretting

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:34:41 GMT

My immersion heater had been on the blink. Seemingly, turn it on, and nothing happens. Well, yesterday evening it was on for a couple of hours, and when I switched it off, OW!!

Switch waaaaay too hot. Not hot enough to actually burn me, nor hot enough to be smelling of hot electrical stuff, but not good. So, switch it off, switch off relevant circuit at fusebox, call landlord.

Thames Water have recently replaced old, leaky iron pipes with new, nonleaky plastic ones, pausing to note that this might mean electrical earthing doesn't work properly any more. My trusty multimeter shows extremely high resistance between water pipes and electrical earth. A label on the fuse box says we have protective multiple earthing here; t'internet says, if that's the case, equipotential bonding is particularly essential. And what that would do is connect pipes to earth, which ain't happening.

a beautiful morning

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 05:33:49 GMT

Leaving foolishly early this morning to go away for the weekend. In fact the sun through my window (curtains & window open) woke me before either of the alarm clocks did.

Life -- at least, the sensible variety -- gravitates towards the morning and evening in weather like this. It all evokes for me the warm summer of 1999 -- cycling through the morning air under trees, cooking slowly in exceedingly cool buildings with spectacularly poor thermal characteristics, new media hype. Some things change, some stay the same.

Work have, thankfully, fixed their air conditioning. Yesterday it was actually cooler on the inside than the outside.

Right. Time to fly north; y'all have a good weekend now.